The codebase I work on has a bunch of Ruby scripts with "highly-context-dependent" bits of code in them that I have to occasionally dive into to find out why they're failing.
Elsewhere in this thread people are complaining about how few Ruby jobs there are. I'm eliminating one of those jobs.
I replace each script with Python, or Java / Kotlin. I don't have the time to learn about all of these contexts. And I can't afford to hire people who want to specialize in Ruby. And typical engineers can't intuit about them, so nobody can properly support them. But those engineers can typically intuit between Java and Python just fine.
I understand that there is Portuguese poetry and that I may not understand it. But I don't mix it into a book of English poetry.
> ...
> None of this is intuitive.
Why would anyone expect that a highly-context-dependent code snippet (in this case, a test suite written in the testing framework's DSL in a language that they both don't know and is different from the languages they usually write) would be "intuitive"?
Frankly I feel like many programming language discussions are tainted by the participants tying their own intelligence to whether or not they can understand something at first glance (and if they can't, it must "obviously" be the thing that is wrong). This makes about as much sense to me as concluding that my utter confusion when glancing at a page of Portuguese poetry is somehow a problem with the language itself.